Witness a bad idea whose time has come:
Called HourCar and started this week by the Neighborhood Energy Consortium, a St. Paul nonprofit organization, the program is modeled after a car-sharing program in San Francisco. It offers the benefits of a car without the hassle and expense of ownership, said Mary Morse, the organization's executive director.
Members pay a fee to join and then reserve times to use one of the six cars available.
The new American dream: sharing a car with strangers. Doesn't exactly stir up images of James Dean, Route 66, and the lure of the open road does it? I was shocked, yes shocked to discover that this utopian car sharing concept did not originate here in the land of the free. From San Francisco's City CarShare:
By the middle of the 1990s, car-sharing was booming in Europe, attracting tens of thousands of members in various German cities, in Switzerland, and in Holland. The activists behind this movement believed that car-sharing had implications beyond its personal benefits. Car-sharing prefigured the role of the automobile in a sustainable society.
In a sustainable society, instead of taking a car along to every destination throughout the day, people would rely primarily on foot, bike, and public transit. But for special trips--carrying something heavy or going somewhere rural--cars would still be necessary. This is the niche for car-sharing. Members would pay based on how much they drive, giving people a price incentive to drive less. The total number of cars needing to be stored-parked-in a city would be reduced, allowing land to be converted to better uses than parking lots. Shared cars would be kept at train stations, helping people get from the train to their final destination.
Across the Atlantic, we watched all this, and we knew that we had to find a way to bring car-sharing to North America. Vancouver and Montreal were first. Portland, Oregon came next, followed quickly by Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco.
And now Minneapolis and St. Paul. Lucky us.
If you are wondering how this can possibly work from an economic perspective, don't worry, it doesn't have to. If you visit the Hour Car web site, you can see who their "partners" (read-groups that sling the ching) are:
*Metro Commuter Services
*Hennepin County
*Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
*Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
*The Saint Paul Foundation
*Citizens for a Loring Park Community
*The Minnesota State Office of Environmental Assistance
*The Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul
*The Capitol River Council
*Transit for Livable Communities
*The Federal Transit Administration
*The Aveda corporation
*The Uptown Association
A few nonprofits, a couple of civic organizations, a foundation, a business and a bunch of government organizations. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the majority of the funding is coming from the gubamint. In other words, the taxpayers are helping to foot the bill so that a very small group of urban sophisticates can feel smug and self-satisfied because they're living a more "sustainable lifestyle." And without all that "hassle and expense of ownership." It would be nice if part of this "sustainable lifestyle" credo included the concept of self-reliance. How about livin' it on your own dime for a change?
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